Influential Stories and Authors

Many of the more influential stories were archived at the Croft Codex (up until 2007) and at Tales Of Power And Beauty (up until circa 2005). A few of these stories are still available online at fanfiction.net.

Fan opinion:
This section contains personal opinions from a Tomb Raider fan.
(This notice may only be removed by a Lead Editor.)

From a recent (October 2008) email conversation, quoted with permission:

Influential authors...that's hard to say. For myself, the author known as C. Mage got me wanting to write TR stories in the first place, as I read First Date and decided that if he could do it, so could I, and collaborating with him was a lot of fun; same with Dr. Amazing :) And Bowen Greenwood, while he didn't inspire me to start writing, gave me tons of useful suggestions and feedback and became one of my beta readers, so he inspired me to keep going. If I recall, SilverRope was inspired by Ryan Foley, though he was known more for his reviews at Tales of Power and Beauty than his single work of fiction.
Melanie Pitt, Alan Wong and Darth Vader all at one time either borrowed a character from me or cited me as an inspiration in e-mail correspondence, though I don't have any of those e-mails any longer to back up that claim ...

A chronology of Tomb Raider Fiction

For a time line for the writing of various Tomb Raider stories from 1996 to the present day, including some synopses of the various tales and details of which authors won awards, please go to this page.

The influence of fan fiction on franchise "reboots" in the media

Fan opinion:
This section contains personal opinions from a Tomb Raider fan.
(This notice may only be removed by a Lead Editor.)

Many of the television programmes and movies that have appeared over the last few years are so-called "reboots" of classic stories, using the characters and scenarios from earlier years. Examples include Battlestar Galactica, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Transformers, as well as the Batman and Superman franchises. Various big players in the media world - such as Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and J.J.Abrams (Lost) - are acknowledged fan fiction alumni, and it could be argued that the entire film career of Quentin Tarantino is nothing more than big budget fan fiction.

Given this, it is possible that one day fan fiction - now a despised genre in the same way that pulp detective fiction and early science fiction used to be - will become more and more influential. It is highly possible that eventually individual writers will emerge from the thousands of fan fiction authors to take their place among the list of "proper" authors, recognised by the mainstream literati.

Sadly - as yet - no Tomb Raider fan fiction has influenced the writing of either a Tomb Raider film, or the plot of a Tomb Raider game, but one day this situation may change.

"Fan fiction has had no impact on the Tomb Raider stories at Crystal because, in all honesty, I have never read a single piece of fan fiction. I love that people are inspired to write them, but I have never read any." [2]